Lotte Goslar: 1907-97.

She was one of the last survivors of the American colony of Germans who had fled the country when the Nazis came to power in 1933. She died peacefully on October 16, 1997, in a nursing home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, just a couple of months after her ninetieth birthday, which she had spent at her farmhouse West Cornwall, Connecticut. Over the years this had become a sort of refuge for her many friends from New York, Los Angeles, and abroad, for she possessed the unique gift of making everybody feel instantly at home as she pottered about, preparing mouthwatering meals (her rum pot of preserved fruits catapulted one straight into bliss), conversing with her cat, and reminiscing about the colorful events of her life.

Born into the family of a well-respected Dresden banker, she always pretended to have danced from the cradle. Actually, Grandma Always Danced became one of the signature pieces of her Pantomime Circus programs, in which she gently surveyed man's earthly existence from the infant's rocking in the cradle, through its growing up and aging, until its entombment -- and beyond, for she was convinced that heaven is just an elevated platform where angels can kick up their heels.

Growing up in Dresden brought her, inevitably, into contact with Mary Wigman and Gret Palucca, icons of the expressionist Ausdruckstanz movement. From them she acquired the necessary technical tools to embark early upon her own path, which led her away from the doom-laden, grim, and tragic horizons explored by her fellow students. She preferred to move into cabaret territory, dealing with the whims and oddities of the human condition in vignettes and sketches which stressed the vagaries and caprices of man and his environment another famous solo of hers was Life of a Flower in which the flower fights its way through the constantly changing conditions of the weather). Instead of sarcastically dealing with the foibles of her contemporaries, Goslar's miniatures always had an optiniistic, life-enhancing, never-say-die quality.

She had just begun a successful career as a solo performer in the border area between dance, mime, and cabaret when Hitler happened, causing her to leave Germany -- not because of any personal harassment (she was neither Jewish nor communist), but because she sensed that trouble was brewing. In Prague she joined the famous cabaret troupe The Peppermill, headed by Erika and Klaus Mann, proceeding from there to Zurich and, finally, to New York and elsewhere in America, where performances flopped and the company disbanded. Stranded in Los Angeles, she eked out a wretched existence, taught movement classes for Hollywood actors (including Marilyn Monroe), and got to know Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, striking up a lifelong friendship with the couple. It was Laughton who introduced her to Bertolt Brecht, who then invited her to collaborate on the Los Angeles production of his Galileo Galilei. Brecht wrote a libretto, Circus Scene, for her Pantomime Circus. It was an acid parable about mob psychology and a fierce indictment of totalitarianism.

From occasional performances with some other crossover artists, she established the Pantomime Circus in 1954 and toured with it widely, including performances in Europe. For eleven years she appeared regularly at Jacob's Pillow, while taking up residence at West Cornwall. This became the headquarters of her small company, whose members came from different professions but all of whom had solid dance schooling. They would assemble for short tours and then temporarily disband until a new project came up. All of her pieces -- which she produced singlehandedly as writer, director, choreographer, costume designer, and, often, performer -- had a strict choreographic base. She kept performing until well into her seventies, though she kept her actual year of birth a top secret. In a way, all of her works were poems; they could be hilarious, melancholy, full of nostalgia, childlike (but never infantile), gently poking fun at the foibles of mankind. But at their core they were all deeply human and full of empathy for her fellow beings.

An article in the December 1980 Dance Magazine refers to Goslar as "Choreographer and Clown." However, in the last analysis, all attempts to categorize her fail because she was, simply, like no one else. One of her last stage appearances was in Martha Clarke's Vienna Lusthaus in 1986, when she was almost eighty. Elegantly robed in a sumptuous Viennese fin-de-siecle dress, she portrayed a worldly-wise woman of distinction, who had ascended to the peaks of life and also plunged to its nadir. That, perhaps, best sums up the nine decades of her life, some chapters of which she charmingly retells in her memoirs, What's So Funny?, to be published shortly by Harwood Academic Publishers of London.